1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to computer networks. More specifically, this disclosure is related to an Interest packet that includes a name and a payload.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of mobile computing and cellular networks is making digital content more mobile than ever before. People can use their smartphones to generate content, to consume content, or even to provide Internet access to other computing devices that generate or consume content. Oftentimes, a device's network location can change as a person takes this device to a new physical location. This can make it difficult to communicate with this device under a traditional computer network (e.g., the Internet) when the device's new network location is not known.
To solve this problem, information-centric network architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing digital content based on its name, regardless of the content's physical or network location. These architectures allow a network device to obtain data from a content producer, regardless of the content producer's physical or network location, or from any other device that has cached the same piece of content. Content-centric Networking (CCN) or named-data networking is an example of an Information-centric networking architecture.
In CCN, Interests do not include a payload. Each Interest encodes the information necessary for reaching a content producer in the Interest's name. Some client devices attach additional information into an Interest's name to provide this information to the content producer. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount information that can be attached to the Interest's name. A name that is too large can cause routers to drop the Interest packet when the name does not fit into a pending interest table (PIT), or when the name does not match an entry in a forwarding information base (FIB).